Host4ASP.net Review – Windows Hosting

 Host4ASP.net is a fairly new company that was launched in June of 2013.  Even though they have only been around for a little over a year and a half they have rapidly increased their client base.  In fact, they currently power over 20,000 websites.  They have customers all around the globe, as well.  As the name might suggest they support ASP.net which is used on Windows servers.  But, what are webmasters saying about their experience with them?  Are they a dependable solution for your Windows servers needs?

Whenever I review a web hosting company I like to look at a number of different things.  I like to look at their features, reliability, uptime, performance, customer support, and last but not least their price tag.  Then after I carefully evaluate each I will then recommend them to webmasters or state what I feel they could improve upon.  At the top of each review, I have a rating system on how I rate them on all these different areas.  In case you just want to skim this Host4ASP.net review you can quickly take a glance at the ratings.

Host4ASP.net Features

Host4ASP.net offers 2 different kinds of plans.  They offer Windows hosting plans and then SSD hosting plans.  There are 3 different plans under each category.  So under their Windows plan there are 3 plans offered and under their SSD plans, there are also 3 different plans offered.   I should note that they are named the same plans.  If you’re purchasing from them make sure you are on their SSD page if you want SSD or vice versa with Windows plans.  Now I will go into the details on what you’re getting with these plans.

Windows Hosting

Basic

The Windows plan is the cheapest option at Host4ASP.net.  It’s $2.95/month.  It comes with 10 GB of disk space, 1 site, unlimited subdomains, bandwidth, and dedicated IP ($2).  If you’re looking to start your very first site and have a small budget you can easily  take advantage of this plan without spending a lot of money.  They are much cheaper than iPower and Doteasy.

Advance

The Advance plan is their next cheapest plan.  It’s $5.95/month.  There are no limits to the storage, 6 sites, unlimited subdomains, and bandwidth (see this article on unlimited bandwidth offers though), and also a dedicated IP for $2 more a month.  Also, with this plan it has twice as much site memory allocation, concurrent connections, etc.

Business

The business plan is another option for $14.95/month.  Just like the Advance plan, there are no  caps to storage, supports as many sites as you want, no limitations to subdomains and bandwidth, and a free dedicated IP address.  It comes with five times as much site memory allocation, concurrent connections, WebSitePanel+.

SSD Hosting

Basic

The Basic plan for SSD is $4.95/month.  Just like the other basic plan it comes with 10 GB of disk space, 1 site, unlimited subdomains, bandwidth, and dedicated IP ($2).  I should note that the price tag is based on how you make your payments.  For instance, 36 months is $4.95/month, 24 months is $5.95/month, and 12 months is $6.95/month.

Advance

The Advance plan for SSD is $8.95/month.  There are no limits to the storage, 6 sites, unlimited subdomains and bandwidth, and also a dedicated IP for $2 more a month.  Also, with this plan it has twice as much site memory allocation, concurrent connections, etc.  I should note that the price tag is based on how you make your payments.  For instance, 36 months is $8.95/month, 24 months is $9.95/month, and 12 months is $10.95/month.

Business

Last but not least is the Business plan with SSD and it is $19.95/month.  Just like the Advance plan, there are no  caps to storage, supports as many sites as you want, no limitations to subdomains and bandwidth, and a free dedicated IP address.  It comes with five times as much site memory allocation, concurrent connections, WebSitePanel+.  I should note that the price tag is based on how you make your payments.  For instance, 36 months is $19.95/month, 24 months is $23.95/month, and 12 months is $27.95/month.

Now, if you have been reading my reviews you’ll notice that I am not a fan of anything that says unlimited anything.   Yes, I know it’s a marketing gimmick, and I always take the time to ask to see what the real limits are.  As long as your site is not doing anything illegal or violating their TOS.  The Basic, Advance, and Business support 5,000/10,000/50,000 inodes.

VPS Plans

Host4ASP.net does offer VPS plans which were a new addition in 2015. They have 4 different plans for your VPS needs. You have the option to pick between the Windows 2008 R2 Standard Edition or Windows 2012 R2 Standard Edition. From there you can pick the plan that is right for you. These are the four plans offered:

Barebone VPS. This plan comes with 40 GB of disk space, 1 GB of RAM, 1 CPU Core, 1 IP, and 400 GB of bandwidth. It cost $29.95/month. You do get price discounts when you sign up for a 3 month to a 3-year contract.

Developers VPS. This plan comes with 60 GB of disk space, 1 GB of RAM, 2 CPU cores, 1 IP, and 600 GB of bandwidth. It cost $39.95/month. You do get price discounts when you sign up for a 3 month to a 3-year contract.

Business VPS. This plan comes with 60 GB of disk space, 2 GB of RAM, 2 CPU cores, 2 IP’s, and 2400 GB of bandwidth. It cost $44.95/month. You do get price discounts when you sign up for a 3 month to 3 years contract.

Managed VPS. This plan comes with 60 GB of disk space, 1 GB of RAM, 2 CPU cores, 1 IP, and 2400 GB of bandwidth. It cost $39.95/month. You do get price discounts when you sign up for 3 months to 3 years contract.

I should note that you can always upgrade the disk space to 200 GB of storage, 8 GB of RAM, 4 CPU cores, 6 IP’s, and 3600 GB of bandwidth. It does cost a little extra depending on how many more resources you need on your server, though.

Reseller Plans

Host4ASP.net does offer 3 different reseller plans. Each of these plans supports unlimited websites, comes with free setups, IIS 8.5, .NET 1.1/2/3.5SP1/4.5/5, MSSQL 2012/2014 & MySQL, unlimited email accounts, and 20% off domain names, 20% off domain privacy, and 20% off SSL.

The prices and details are down below:

SSL Certificates

With Host4ASP.net you can always purchase SSL Certificates.  Back in August of 2014 Google announced that they would be giving small ranking improvements to sites that switched from HTTP to HTTPS.  With Host4ASP.net these SSL’s are 2048-bit.  You can purchase them for one site, multiple websites, and subdomains.

Control Panel

For Host4ASP.net they use WebSitePanel or WebSitePanel+ for Business plans.  Really, I have always been accustom to cPanel, but I do like the way it works.  Everything is neatly tucked away and it’s certainly very functional.  There is even a demo section on their site where you can poke around before you use their service.  Just like cPanel, I found it pretty easy to use.  Within minutes I was able to manage domains, sites, scripts, databases, FTP, billing, etc.

Money-Back Guarantee

Some companies do a wonderful job with a money-back guarantee, while others like ServerPronto don’t.  However, Host4ASP.net has a decent money-back guarantee.  If you’re not completely satisfied with their service you can get a 30-day money back guarantee.  No questions asked and it’s no prorated.

Now that we have gotten all the technical stuff out of the way you should have a good understanding of the features they offer.  Next, I will go over their uptime, performance, customer support, and then round out the evaluation in the summary.

HostASP.net Uptime and Performance

Uptime

A lot of hosting companies will make these bold claims about uptime.  They will spit out numbers like 99.9% uptime and sometimes 100% uptime.  Uptime is something your website is going to need period.  Let’s face it if you’re site is always down and you’re having to take the time out of your day to reach out to customer support, fix bugs, etc. that is a huge waste of time.  With Host4ASP.net you can trust that your website is going to be up 99.9% of the time.  

Performance

Since HostASP.net uses SSD hosting I had very high hopes for their performance.  Meaning SSD is really the direction that the hosting industry is going.  Many companies like HostForWeb and MDDHosting are using SSD storage just like Host4ASP.net.  The drives are much more efficient and 100 times faster than HDD.  So one way I check the performance of their servers is to go to Isitdownrightnow.com.  When you go there you can type in any URL and it will give you the response time.  Typically, I get excited to see response times under 20 ms (milliseconds).  21-50 ms is considered average.  Anything over 51 ms is typically considered slower.  When I tested their servers I found out that their response time was 118.32 ms.

Host4ASP.net Customer Support

Let’s face it with me and a lot of other webmasters customer support can either make or break a hosting company.  HostASP.net has 24/7 customer support.  You can get ahold of them through live chat which is my preferred method.  On November 23, 2014, I was doing some research on this company and figured I would jump on live chat to test their customer support speed.   It was insanely fast and only took about 1 minute to get a response.  Thanks to Tom for taking the time to chat with me on live chat :).  Their techs obviously know what they are talking about and are very helpful.  Also, it was Saturday night at 10:30 PM PST.  Yeah, I know I like to do my research late at night and on the weekend.

Also, you can always get ahold of them through email.  You can contact support or sales anytime.  But, if there is one thing I think HostASP.net might want to add into their support it is telephone support.   However, I do prefer to use live chat unless it’s a dire emergency.

Lastly, they do have a nice section on their site which is their “knowledgebase”.  A lot of the questions you might have will be answered there.    

Host4ASP.net Review Summary

Normally, I like to test out companies for awhile before either giving them a recommendation or telling you to go elsewhere.  In fact, I searched for about 1 solid hour trying to find some kind of dirt on their name.  I couldn’t find anything bad to say about their company.  So if you need Windows hosting or SSD hosting they could be a good company to do business with. 

I recommend them for SMB (small to medium-sized businesses).  If you’re going to need a dedicated server their servers might not be able to support your website.  If that is the case I would highly recommend reading about InMotion.  InMotion is a company I have been using for 6 years and actually host tbwhs.com.

I would like to hear from previous or past customers of Host4ASP.net and let us know what you think about their service.  Do you recommend them or did you have issues with them?  Also, if you found this Host4ASP.net review helpful would you mind sharing it on any social networking sites you actively participate on?  Thanks for  reading.

Research on Host4Asp.net

Interviews with Host4Asp.net customers.